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Sony Trinitron

It is hard for anyone who can’t remember back to the original PlayStation, but back in the 1980s and the 1990s Sony was a technology company that held the kind of stature that Apple currently holds in consumer minds. Trinitron had the kind of gravitas that Apple’s iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy have now.

In fact, Sony used to do a fair bit of industrial and product design for Apple. The initial Apple PowerBook range was designed by Sony and the 3 1/2 floppy disk that was the hallmark of the original Mac was down to Sony engineers who collaborated with the Apple team to get the product ready in time. Steve Jobs self-imposed uniform of black mock-turtleneck jumpers and Levi 501s was inspired by a conversation he had with Akio Morita about the use of corporate uniforms inside Sony Japan which created corporate cohesion. (Sony had implemented these, because workers in post-war Japan struggled to afford clothes). Jobs cited Sony, alongside Cuisinart and Braun as companies that he would like to emulate in terms of product design.

Part of Sony’s pre-eminent position was down to their amazing electronic, electrical and mechanical engineering chops combined with great product design and an attention to detail which churned out a succession of small high-performance products including high-end personal tape cassette players (the Walkman), personal compact disc players (the Discman) and camcorders (Video8 and Hi-8).

Often consumers couldn’t afford the high-end designs so the mid-and-low range products that they bought had the Sony quality and design ‘halo’ around these products.

The second thing that supported Sony was the high quality of their televisions. This was due partly to the industrial design that Sony perfected – particularly in their portable television sets.

The deal closer was Sony’s display technology called Trinitron.

Trinitron signified the technology that Sony had inside its screen, and the logo became a mark of quality. The story of Trinitron goes back the mid-1960s, Sony had bet the farm on a great display technology called Chromatron which it had licenced from a small American company. The problem with Chromatron was that it was really hard to make the displays commercially, Sony was getting about three good displays for every 1,000 they made on their production line. The televisions that the displays went into cost twice as much to make as Sony could sell them for. By 1966, Sony was facing financial ruin.

So they took a look around at the other technologies pioneered by the likes of GE and RCA to try and work out how they could come up with a unique patentable product. In double quick time, Sony came up with a display with an electron gun at the back of the cathode ray tube with three electrodes (for the red, green and blue composite colours), permanent magnets to focus the electron stream and an aperture grill made up of tiny wires hung vertically connected by one or two tungsten stabilising wire going horizontally across them.

This gave Trinitron displays a bright, high contrast, high-colour display with no gaps between the colour phosphor dots on the screen. I still use a Trinitron set to watch DVDs because it provides a superior colour and contrast to more modern LCD screens. Modern LCDs have to use a lot of power; up to 1,000 watts to try and match the contrast of the Trinitron set. In 1996 Sony’s patents ran out and technological change with copycat designs from Mitsubishi and ViewSonic; followed by LCD displays eroded Sony’s advantage in the market. Prior to bowing out of the market Sony made its WEGA sets which feature the best consumer Trinitron screens to date – and can be picked up on eBay for a song. In 2008, Sony stopped selling Trinitron televisions in the developed word (though WEGA sets continued to be sold in China).

It still has a production line in Singapore making Trinitron displays for professional use, in particular video monitors. Sony’s television business is now bleeding cash as it no longer has a best-of-breed display technology advantage and so consumers will no longer pay a premium price because it’s a Sony. A Sony BRAVIA LCD television is a Sharp or Samsung panel display with Sony electronics and packaging.

Efforts to commercialise OLED displays have so far proven to be unsuccessful so far; though Sony does offer a Trimaster branded version of these for high-end video monitoring. Presumably the Trimaster brand is allusion to the gold standard that Trinitron provided. More Sony related content here.

February 7, 2012
Tape pack

Back in the day many computer games, audio books and language course used to come in a book sized moulded plastic sleeve lined with four or six cassette tapes called a tape pack. There would be a sleeve that would take a cover on the outside like a DVD film case (or a VHS film case before it). The boxes were pretty flimsy but they did better than the brittle plastic that went into cassette and CD album ‘jewel cases’.

From the early 1990s through to the early noughties the tape pack took on a new cultural significance.

Organisers of nightclub events quickly realised that consumers who couldn’t afford to attend every event could still be sold the evenings sound track on a series of tapes. Also people who had been often wanted to relive the night listening to the tapes on their Walkman, at home on the stereo, or as was usually the case on the car stereo. In the same way that I bought records by certain artists, remixers and record labels; club goers would by tape packs by their favourite DJs; given that a big name could play four sets on a Saturday night, they maybe chasing down £60 of tapes for that week.

The boxes acted as a bill board for the club with flyer art on the front that parodied famous brands, were surreal or had fantastic themes with boasts of five or eight kilo-watt audio systems by TurboSound alongside details of the number of smoke machines and lasers in the club.

DAT machines started appearing in the DJ booth. Even a wine bar that I played garage sets in on a Wednesday night had a HHb professional DAT recorder (that would have been at home in a recording studio as a tape machine for mastering albums) underneath the counter of the DJ booth.

Tape packs were big money for club promoters and the independent record shops that supported the dance music scene at the time. tape packs jostled for shelf space behind the counter with racks of records. I am partly convinced that the C-90 cassette format was responsible for DJ’s working 90-minute slots at a club. The tape pack started a long slow decline. The writing was on the wall with the rise of the super-club who looked to have a record label, alongside their fashion brand and club nights. DMC had shown the way with Mixmag Live – the first legal mix series.

With the notable exception of the Ministry of Sound; the focus moved from the club franchise to the DJ; and DJ’s got their own production record deals with the dance imprints of major labels.

Secondly, since recording a CD at first meant going into a studio, big name DJs used technologies like Digidesign’s Sound Tools and Pro Tools audio editing and production software to clean up their mixes, mould them and sound a lot better than they really were. These mixes has more in common with studio megamixes like Mirage’s Jack Mix series or and edit mixes a la Chris ‘Steinski’ Stein and Danny Krivits than DJing; but their superior flawless quality was more popular with consumers.

The reason why this decline was slow was partly due to market forces; whilst the Discman replaced the Walkman as the personal stereo of choice; CD production took a long time to come down in costs to tape duplication and in-car audio still had a large installed base of cassette head units.

In addition, early car CD units jumped and skipped tracks with every bump in the road and the cartridge units that held the CDs often scratched them. Fragmentation of dance music into different genres (and socio-economic classes of audiences if we’re honest about it) and in particular the reliance of happy hardcore and drum & bass relying on borrowing and shared sounds meant that tape packs lasted longest supporting these genres of music.

Now these recordings are remastered by consumers into digital formats and shared or sold online. More culture related content can be found here.

February 1, 2012
Privacy policies + more news

Google privacy policies

Official Google Blog: Updating our privacy policies and terms of service – a confluence of events are affecting Google’s privacy policies. The fact that Google has over 70 different privacy policies implies a whole range of issues with version control and updating. Secondly there is the regulatory pressure to simplify privacy policies so that consumers can understand them if they read them. The consolidation of privacy policies also foreshadows a consolidation of services as well.

Economics

How China’s Boom Caused the Financial Crisis – By Heleen Mees | Foreign Policy – title is misleading as it was a factor, but needs more nuance. Low interest rates and the decline of middle class income led to a need for refinancing. Blaming China is simplistic – it was China, not the U.S. economy, that prospered on Americans’ spending binge. The world’s most populous country grew at double-digit rates for much of the 2000s. And while the U.S. savings rate hovered around 15 percent of GDP, China’s savings rate increased from 38 percent in 2000 to 54 percent in 2006. China’s savings are heavily skewed toward risk-free assets, perhaps because the Chinese are culturally more risk-averse, but also because the country’s financial markets are still underdeveloped and not fully liberalized. The large buildup of savings in China and other emerging economies (mostly oil exporters) depressed interest rates worldwide from 2004 on, as too much money was chasing U.S. Treasury bonds and other supposedly risk-free securities, driving up the price of bonds and driving down interest rates. Thus, by the time the Fed started to worry about rising inflation by mid-2004, leading the Fed to try to put the brakes on the economy, it was already too late

Finance

Saudi equities: a lifting of the veil? | FT.com – opens up market to direct institutional investment

Innovation

Fujitsu mobile phones boost diabetic support services ‹ Japan Today

Japan

Japan losing its manufacturing edge to South Korea ‹ Japan Today – lacks conviction so isn’t taking the risks that Korea will

Korea

Unpacking the Fourth Quarter Numbers at Samsung Electronics – WSJ – issues with profit margins abound

Luxury

Louis Vuitton Sets A New Standard In Federal Trademark And Copyright Law : Fashion Apparel Law Blog

Media

Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship | TorrentFreak

Online

I, Cringely » Absence makes the heart grow fonder and other weird thoughts – on SOPA protests

Why the feds smashed Megaupload – interesting timing around SOPA | PIPA protests and the MegaUpload versus Universal Music dispute over the MegaUpload advert

Retailing

London department stores become the ‘Great Mall of China’｜WantChinaTimes.com – each Chinese shopper on average spent 2,520 pounds (US$4,000) in Harrods

Technology

ARM’s stiff upper lip trembles at Chipzilla’s Medfield | ExtremeTech

January 30, 2012
2012 Chinese social web eco-system

In many ways the 2012 Chinese social web is richer than our own with a fiercely competitive marketplace and rapid innovation taking place amongst more evenly matched players. Social networks are stratified more along demographic lines which are in flux as developments occur. The brightest star at the moment is Sina’s Weibo service, but its not the only one.

Weibo has taken off in China in a similar way to Facebook, and has led Twitter in terms of rolling out innovations.

A second aspect of the 2012 Chinese social web is that these platforms offer segmentation. They vary in terms of the age groups that group on different platforms. Kids up to college age on one platform. Adults on another. Lower tier (less economically developed) cities inhabitants use different social platforms to those in higher tier cities.

Finally, there is a classic aspect of Chinese business. Once an idea has proven to be successful, lots of competitors will spring up. That is why in places like the UK you will end up with a number of Chinese restaurants open next to each other.

This happens in the online sphere also. The 2012 Chinese social web represents this business cluster. The next stage will be for intense business competition to thin their ranks out over the next few years.
This infographic came from Sinatechblog.com.cn

January 27, 2012
Lunar new year culture clash
Just before lunar new year an incident happened on Hong Kong’s MTR mass transit system between a group of ‘mainlanders’ and Hong Kong natives.

So what drove this flare up around lunar new year? There are a number of points at which friction occurs between the two societies.

The modern city of Hong Kong has largely been built on the rule of law. It has the second largest police force in the world in term of number of police per member of the population. The ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) cleaned up Hong Kong bureaucracy for the past four decades to a standard that surpasses countries like the UK and the US.

Hong Kong runs on rules that are designed to keep things civil but without the rigidity of say Singapore. China is a bit different. It has gone through enormous wrenching changes over the past three decades and societal norms and customs have struggled to keep pace. Wider altruism that was fostered during Mao’s era is frowned upon and there are legal implications around being a good samaritan that are an unintended consequence of Chinese case law. That doesn’t mean to say that the civic society doesn’t exist, but that it exists in a more laissez-faire environment which can be good in terms of less barriers and more experimental approaches to social problems.

As a Chinese friend once told me:

In the UK you can largely say what you like, in China you can largely do what you like

This is a foundation for some of the very different world views. Then there are specific points at which friction arises, some of which is similar to the kind of inter-territory rivalry you see between London and other UK cities, or different counties in Ireland:
- Perceived levels of sophistication and urbane living versus ignorance, a lack of taste and poor manners
- Perceived focus on money and consumerism over everything else in life
- Culture or the lack of it (language and food being the main fault lines)
Some of which is legitimate, to name two:
- Mainland Chinese desperate to ensure their kids have a Hong Kong identity using underhand techniques to have their children born in Hong Kong. One can understand the desire to do the best for one’s child, but I can also see the Hong Kong side to this as well. In addition, all of this running around cloak-and-dagger style adds additional risk and stress – which can’t be good for mother or child?
- Over exploitation of Mainland tourists being forced to shop in certain stores and spend money. This is partly due the subsidised business model that tour operators used to get mainland Chinese to go on shopping trips to Hong Kong. The subsidy came from ensuring that they purchased from certain Hong Kong shops. It is similar in nature to the cheap or free holidays offered to sell timeshare properties in Spain and Portugal – immoral but the rational consumer would realise what they were likely to be stepping into
Here is the video on Tudou without English subtitles:

More related content here.
January 25, 2012